The best news about Wednesday’s renewal of negotiations between the NHL and NHLPA is that both sides have agreed to keep things quiet, meeting in an undisclosed location with federal mediators returning to the table.

After last week’s fiasco at a Times Square hotel, where union executive director Donald Fehr announced that a deal was within reach, then had to backtrack in a second press conference after deputy commissioner Bill Daly broke off talks with a voicemail, followed by a fire-and-brimstone session featuring Daly and his boss, Gary Bettman, it is difficult to argue with the decision to stop negotiating publicly.

It’s not as if media camped outside a meeting room represents a real threat to getting a collective bargaining agreement done, but the sentiment is understandable. If the NHL and NHLPA are driving a car together, arguing about the right way to get where they’re going, reporters are basically kids in the back seat, forever asking “Are we there yet?”

By agreeing to the NHLPA’s request to bring mediators back into the picture, the NHL has basically agreed to pull over and ask for directions. Whether or not they listen this time is anyone’s guess.

The sides did appear to be close to a deal last week, when the players agreed to the concept of term limits on contracts, if not to the league’s desired maximum of seven-year deals for players staying with the same team and five years for players changing teams. The NHL also wants a longer CBA than the players do, but there is room for compromise on both fronts.

The big question now is back to what it was at the beginning of negotiations: money. Again, the NHLPA has agreed to the NHL’s basic desire for a 50-50 split of hockey-related revenue, but only if the league honored all existing contracts. The money to make that happen was going to come from the league’s “Make Whole” plan until Bettman, at the urging of the owners, took that offer off the table last Thursday.

If there was media availability for the new talks, the first question would be whether Make Whole was back on the table, and how there could possibly be a deal without one. The last time the second part of that question was asked, after last Thursday’s breakdown, Winnipeg Jets defenseman Ron Hainsey’s response was a simple “I don’t know.”

Of course, there was no deal last week with Make Whole as part of the conversation, so there is no guarantee that anything positive will happen if the NHL reconsiders its decision. There are other options available, anyway, such as a gradual step-down to a 50-50 split of hockey-related revenue after the players had been receiving 57%. The NHL has never shown interest in that, but it’s a whole lot easier than trying to come up with a magic number of out-of-system dollars to put into Make Whole.

Whatever the specifics are, nobody really cares much now anyway, and that is the real reason that it’s no big deal that the media won’t be part of the festivities for this go-around of negotiations. Hockey fans—the media’s customers—have only one question that they want answered now: is there a deal, or isn’t there? Until the answer changes, and until we can delve into the details of what’s in the new CBA, and how it was reached, nothing that can be said in a press conference has very much meaning. If there was a lesson to be learned from last week’s gong show, that was it.

If the NHL and NHLPA are not talking to the media, neither one can take advantage of having the first opportunity to speak in order to get hockey fans’ spirits up, only to have the other side play the bring-down role a few minutes later. That has been the pattern since the summer, for both sides, and each time, as they have gotten objectively closer to a deal, the dashing of hopes has been more painful than the last.

Enough is enough. The kids in the back seat can break out a coloring book for a little while, and the bickering parents in the front seat can let us know when we get there, or when they run out of gas.